THEATRICAL CAST OF ATHENS: INTERACTIONS BETWEEN ANCIENT GREEK DRAMA AND SOCIETY.
Journal Data
| Type | SOURCE_BOOK |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (GB) |
| ISBN-13 | 9780199298891 |
| Open Library | OL13668215W |
| Total publications | 7 |
| Coverage period | 2006 - 2006 |
| Language | UND |
| Cited by | 9 |
| h-index | 1 |
Hall examines ancient Greek drama and its relationship to the society in which it was produced. By focusing on the ways in which the plays treat gender, ethnicity, and class, and on their theatrical conventions, this work offers a study of the Greek theatrical masterpieces within their social context.
Casting the Role of Trygaeus in Aristophanes’ Peace
This chapter examines what was required of the actor who played Trygaeus, and shows that although the role entailed some uniquely acrobatic displays upon the theatrical crane, it also made extreme vocal demands. The actor not only had to sing tragic lyrics while ascending on his dung-beetle, but to recite tragic anapaests, display a command of Stesichorean lyric, and latterly extemporize in hexameters from cues like a rhapsode at the Panathenaea.…
Childbearing Women
This chapter focuses on a particular category of theatrical role — the woman who gives birth at around the dramatic moment that the play is set; birth plots appeared in all the ancient genres of drama, in both Greek and Latin. It considers why dramatists were so attracted to childbirth as a theme, how the male actors dealt with the requirement to look pregnant or feign labour pains, and how these phenomena fitted with the clear reluctance, at lea…
The Scythian Archer in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae
In ancient Greece, pretending to belong to a different ethnic group was a significant source of humour. In Thesmophoriazusae the tritagonist, who had earlier in the play appeared in such histrionically extravagant roles as Agathon and Cleisthenes, faced the most demanding ‘ethnic’ role in the extant Greek comic repertoire: for the last quarter of the play he needed to pretend to be not only unfree and untutored in theatre, but an import into Athe…
Lawcourt Dramas
This chapter takes the argument out of the theatre and into the lawcourts, one of the contexts which most clearly reveals the increasingly theatrical tenor (or ‘cast’) of Athenian society at large and of its public discourses. In a survey of the corpus of legal oratory from classical Athens, it is argued that the analogy between a trial and a theatrical performance was close and multilayered. There were strong similarities between the writing of …
The Theatrical Roles of Athens
This chapter addresses the concept of the dramatic role in classical Greece from a series of perspectives: the author's, the actor's, the audience's, and that of the wider society beyond the immediate performance context. It argues that although there was no equivalent of the term ‘role’ in ancient Greek, in this absence lies a clue to the extraordinary strength of the conflation of the actor with his represented character at the time of performa…
Female Personifications of Poetry in Old Comedy
This chapter explores the way in which the poets of Old Comedy — Cratinus and Pherecrates as well as Aristophanes — required actors to impersonate literary abstractions that were gendered feminine, such as Poetry and Comedy. The world-stage relationship took on an extremely concrete, vivid, and self-conscious form in a theatrical genre where actors playing ‘real’ members of the community, such as dramatists and other poets, abused other actors pl…
The Theatrical Cast of Athens
This study explores the numerous different ways in which we can understand the relationship between the real, social world in which the Athenians lived and the theatrical roles that they invented. In twelve studies of role types and the theatrical conventions that contributed to their creation — including women in childbirth, drowning barbarians, horny satyrs, allegorical representations of Comedy, peasant farmers, tragic masks, and solo sung ari…
The Theatrical Cast of Athens
This study explores the numerous different ways in which we can understand the relationship between the real, social world in which the Athenians lived and the theatrical roles that they invented. In twelve studies of role types and the theatrical conventions that contributed to their creation — including women in childbirth, drowning barbarians, horny satyrs, allegorical representations of Comedy, peasant farmers, tragic masks, and solo sung ari…
Casting the Role of Trygaeus in Aristophanes’ Peace
This chapter examines what was required of the actor who played Trygaeus, and shows that although the role entailed some uniquely acrobatic displays upon the theatrical crane, it also made extreme vocal demands. The actor not only had to sing tragic lyrics while ascending on his dung-beetle, but to recite tragic anapaests, display a command of Stesichorean lyric, and latterly extemporize in hexameters from cues like a rhapsode at the Panathenaea.…
Childbearing Women
This chapter focuses on a particular category of theatrical role — the woman who gives birth at around the dramatic moment that the play is set; birth plots appeared in all the ancient genres of drama, in both Greek and Latin. It considers why dramatists were so attracted to childbirth as a theme, how the male actors dealt with the requirement to look pregnant or feign labour pains, and how these phenomena fitted with the clear reluctance, at lea…
The Scythian Archer in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae
In ancient Greece, pretending to belong to a different ethnic group was a significant source of humour. In Thesmophoriazusae the tritagonist, who had earlier in the play appeared in such histrionically extravagant roles as Agathon and Cleisthenes, faced the most demanding ‘ethnic’ role in the extant Greek comic repertoire: for the last quarter of the play he needed to pretend to be not only unfree and untutored in theatre, but an import into Athe…
Lawcourt Dramas
This chapter takes the argument out of the theatre and into the lawcourts, one of the contexts which most clearly reveals the increasingly theatrical tenor (or ‘cast’) of Athenian society at large and of its public discourses. In a survey of the corpus of legal oratory from classical Athens, it is argued that the analogy between a trial and a theatrical performance was close and multilayered. There were strong similarities between the writing of …
The Theatrical Roles of Athens
This chapter addresses the concept of the dramatic role in classical Greece from a series of perspectives: the author's, the actor's, the audience's, and that of the wider society beyond the immediate performance context. It argues that although there was no equivalent of the term ‘role’ in ancient Greek, in this absence lies a clue to the extraordinary strength of the conflation of the actor with his represented character at the time of performa…
Female Personifications of Poetry in Old Comedy
This chapter explores the way in which the poets of Old Comedy — Cratinus and Pherecrates as well as Aristophanes — required actors to impersonate literary abstractions that were gendered feminine, such as Poetry and Comedy. The world-stage relationship took on an extremely concrete, vivid, and self-conscious form in a theatrical genre where actors playing ‘real’ members of the community, such as dramatists and other poets, abused other actors pl…
The Theatrical Cast of Athens
This study explores the numerous different ways in which we can understand the relationship between the real, social world in which the Athenians lived and the theatrical roles that they invented. In twelve studies of role types and the theatrical conventions that contributed to their creation — including women in childbirth, drowning barbarians, horny satyrs, allegorical representations of Comedy, peasant farmers, tragic masks, and solo sung ari…